Software Portal

From openSUSE

openSUSE Software Portal / Application Manager

Goals

The goals are to provide the best possible end-user experience with regards to package installation/upgrading at large.

The idea is to provide several software components and services:

• a server backend that aggregates various kinds of information,
  • package repositories: available repositories, available RPM packages, new versions, new packages, ...
  • application metadata sources: e.g. freshmeat.net XML package records, releases, ...
  • display security patch information/updates from the online update repository
  • additional information that is not contained in the RPM metadata nor in the package repositories:
    • screenshots
    • logo
    • comments
    • ratings
    • links to reviews, tips&tricks, themes, ...
    • links to openSUSE web forum threads about the application or individual releases
    • Novell Bugzilla entries related to the application or individual releases
    • (...)
• a web client
  • easily search for packages (package names, package descriptions, files provided by packages, possibly comments, etc..)
  • easily browse "applications" by category and/or tags, with a logo, screenshots, "related" links, ...
  • active user interaction: post comments, ratings, ...
  • one-click installation/upgrade through yast2-mpp
• a desktop client (GTK/Qt/YaST)
  • browse applications
  • review and apply new releases (updates and upgrades), new packages, ...
  • use data provided by the server backend (through Web Services)

Read the transcript of the first online meeting for further details.

Related Links

• very rough and basic mockup of the web client, just to give an idea
• Justin has written a few slides about his current plans for the desktop client
• a first shot at the domain model (using UML)
• Benjamin's one-click installer module for YaST2 (yast2-mpp)
• Web-based package search (webpin)
• One-click Compiz Fusion installer

Technical Aspects

• the server backend and the web client will be developed using
  • Java (6, the GPL'd version 7 later),
  • Spring Framework for Dependency Injection, declarative transactions, ...
  • the awesome Apache Wicket web component framework
  • Maven 2 for build and dependency management
• currently, the plan is to develop the desktop client using Python (still to be discussed though, there are currently no YaST2 bindings for Python)
• the server backend will expose information to other clients (desktop client, other websites, ...) through Web Services (SOAP)

Current Development

See Software_Portal/Setup for information about the current development and how to run/test.

Current Short-Term Roadmap

• set up the project infrastructure (SVN repository, mailing list, ...)
  • Novell Forge project page (*)
  • Subversion repository (*)
  • development mailing-list (*)
• make noise about the project to gather interested developers, web designers, artwork designers, domain experts, people with ideas, ...
• create an initial domain model for the server backend

(*) requires ICS account

Status

Partially Functional

• rpm-md repository import/refresh
• Application: list, add, remove, edit, search, screenshots, rating, tagging (partial, no list per tags yet)
• Repository: add, remove
• Application Packages
• Package Filelists
• Application Search
• Package Search
• File Search
• User: list, add, remove
• login and user role based access restriction
• YMP generation
• Debian repository format importing

Current Tasks

• .desktop file indexing.
• Files-in-package display

Screenshots

Various

Brainstorming

• use Software_Portal/Ideas to track ideas, suggestions, brainstorming
• Brainstorm ideas on the Software_Portal/Look

Meetings

No meetings are currently scheduled.

Archive/logs

• #opensuse-project, Saturday May 12, 2007 19:00 GMT: Transcript